The Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Review: Take Off Your Ti

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Nvidia strips the Ti moniker and some performance from its GeForce GTX 560 Ti in order to create a new lesser-priced model. Can the company's GeForce GTX 560 stand up to AMD's popular Radeon HD 6870, or does it fall short of the value mark?

Overclocking And SLI Benchmarks

These next charts demonstrate the effectiveness of factory overclocking on Asus' GTX 560 DirectCU II TOP and Zotac's GeForce GTX 560 AMP! Edition. Two reference-clocked GeForce GTX 560s in SLI are also included.

In addition, we overclocked one of our GeForce GTX 560s past the factory setting to the highest overclock we could achieve stably. While doing this we made an interesting discovery. Mainly, the Asus GTX 560 DirectCU II TOP is able to increase GPU voltage through the SmartDoctor utility. This card's stock setting is 1.012 V, but this can be increased to 1.112 V using Asus' software.

While we criticized Zotac's GeForce GTX 560 AMP! Edition for its lack of GPU voltage control, we were surprised to see GPU-Z report a stock voltage of 1.142 V. This is higher than the Asus card allows through SmartDoctor. Because of this, we expect comparatively higher GPU temperatures and power usage.

In any case, 1000 MHz was the highest frequency we were able to squeeze out of GF114 at this voltage. With a slight memory overclock to 1125 MHz, we proceed with the benchmarks:

Both of the factory overclocked cards match stock GeForce GTX 560 Ti performance. Then again, with a $220 MSRP, they also end up priced pretty close to some of the least-expensive Ti boards (selling for about $235 at the time of writing).

Note that the highest overclock we achieved manually barely made any difference compared to the factory-overclocked models. From what we’ve seen, the GF114 GPU doesn’t make it past 1 GHz easily. So, the 925+ MHz factory overclocks come so close to the card’s perceived ceiling. We probably wouldn't bother overclocking a GeForce GTX 560 unless we bought it at Nvidia's reference clocks (which do seem to leave room for higher clocks).

Don Woligroski
80 Comments Comment from the forums
  • rolli59
    I am just surprised they did not call it SE!
    Reply
  • daygall
    All these naming schemes are giving me a freakin head ache stupid derp companies, why cant both of them just stick with 1 naming scheme for a while

    if its not amd mucking with my mind and HD6870
    Reply
  • daygall
    srry for the dbl post... but half my comment disapeared ....

    EDIT* if its not amd mucking with my mind and HD6870 < HD5870 = HD6970

    its Nvidia and GTX460 < GTX560Ti >
    Reply
  • kcorp2003
    so that disable part can be flash to re-enable it?
    Reply
  • NuclearShadow
    The naming is certainly for marketing purposes. People are not attracted to lower numbers even when they are more fitting when it comes to new products.
    Yes companies exploit this but on the other hand would their product sell if they didn't? At-least now as well as it would otherwise.

    Take the Xbox 360 as a example. Its predecessor was simply "Xbox"
    It's not the 3rd console of the series and certainly isn't the 360th.
    The 360 is completely meaningless in the name when it comes to the product.
    They didn't want to name it Xbox 2 for the simple reason that loss of sales may occur because of the PS3's 3. They felt that some consumers may feel that because of the higher number the PS3 is superior and should buy that instead. As silly as this may sound to everyone they very likely are correct. Hence why the Xbox 360 was named such. But can you really blame them?

    Final note: I personally find the 360's name funny as it would mean the Xbox 360 by name would be right at where the Xbox is and not of any change.
    Reply
  • geekapproved
    Stupid strategy. MOst people are buying 560ti's and 6950 1GB's. Not 6870's and surely not 560's.
    Reply
  • bobdozer
    Anybody else notice that there is always an nvidia card at the top of toms video reviews?

    Why stop at the 560 TI? You can't use price as an excuse this time around because it costs about the same as the 6950.
    Reply
  • bobdozer
    The conclusion is pretty bad.

    Newegg has a bunch of 6870's costing less than $200 (one is $173 with rebate + free Shogun total war).

    So it's slightly faster, has much better minimum framerates, consumes much less power and is cheaper. I don't see any compelling reason to buy this 560.
    Reply
  • hangfirew8
    Where did you get those puny memory bandwidth values from? HS has the 560TI at 128.3GB/s. You have 4GB/S. Has Nvidia started selling the Fx5200 again?
    Reply
  • elbert
    The 560GTX SLI had no crossfire setup to compare. Was this due to the 560GTX SLI only compares to a 6850CF? The 560ti SLI v/s 6870 CF is a very good compare. In the link the 560ti SLI has 2 wins, 2 losses, and one near tie with 6870 CF.
    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-560-ti-gf114,2845-13.html
    Reply